


put your faith in the devil and the deep blue sea

by ProbablyVoldemort



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 90s, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coma, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, LIKE A LOT OF ANGST, Pre-Apocalypse, Time Loop, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProbablyVoldemort/pseuds/ProbablyVoldemort
Summary: Twenty years ago, when the clocks changed from 11:59pm on December 31st, 1999, to 12:00am on January 1st, 2000, the world ended, exactly as the doomsdayers had predicted.  Now, there are only a few livable months left on Earth, and the privileged are evacuating for a life in space, abandoning the planet.But not everyone has given up.Clarke was only three when the world ended, and she's spent most of her life in her mother's lab.  Now, as the last space ships are preparing to leave, her mother's machine is finally ready, and Clarke and her mother are heading back in time to try to stop the apocalypse from happening in the first place.An attack on the lab leads to Clarke heading back to 1995 on her own, and the past isn't quite how Clarke's vague memories from the beginning of her life paint it.  Clarke soon discovers that not only did the machine do more than just send her back in time, but she wasn't, in fact, sent back alone.Will she be able to stop the apocalypse before the clock strikes midnight?  Or are some parts of history unchangeable?
Relationships: Clarke Griffin/John Murphy
Comments: 24
Kudos: 32
Collections: TROPED: Holiday Trope Exchange 2.0





	put your faith in the devil and the deep blue sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuklash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuklash/gifts).



> Happy Holidays to kuklash!!!!
> 
> Tropes selected:  
> Holiday: Any! (New Year's Eve)  
> Trope 1: Time Loop AU  
> Trope 2: Characters fall on top of one another and have a "moment"  
> Trope 3: Enemies to lovers  
> Trope 4: Superhero AU
> 
> Title is from Where the Shadow Ends by BANNERS
> 
> I got ridiculously into this idea and I could have written six million more words but I had to limit myself. I decided to go with New Year's as my holiday pick here just to spice things up a bit.
> 
> I really don't have much else to say here, except that I really hope you all enjoy!!!

_In the rising wind where the black waves call_   
_To the bones of ships on the ocean floor  
To your hopeless heart left on the shore  
There's nothing left here anymore_

* * *

Shots rang out through the lab as Clarke sprinted towards the machine room, her mom on her heels. Sirens were wailing and people were screaming and Clarke had no idea what was happening.

She pushed open the door and ran inside, searching the room.

“Clarke,” her mom said, and she turned to her. Abby pressed something into her hands. “You’ll have to go alone. This will convince her.”

“No.” Clarke shook her head. “No, Mom. We’re going together, remember? Together.”

“That can’t be the plan anymore, Clarke,” Abby told her, reaching up to cup her daughter’s cheek. “Someone has to work the machine. No one else is here. Don’t fight me, Clarke. You have to survive. You have to save everyone.”

Clarke nodded, swallowing heavily. “Okay,” she agreed, and then grabbed her mom in a hug.

An explosion sounded not far from the door, breaking them apart and sending them running to set everything up. Clarke pulled the chain her mother hand handed her over her head and around her neck.

Everything was ready in minutes, and then Abby was moving behind the controls and Clarke into the range of the machine.

And then time moved in slow motion.

_Bang!_

A shot rang out.

_Bang! Bang!_

Two more.

And then Abby was collapsing forward onto the controls, blood spilling from her chest and her mouth.

Clarke screamed but was frozen to the spot, too terrified to move from the machine, too terrified to take her eyes off her mother’s body.

_Click!_

Her gaze snapped from her mom to the man standing too close to the range of the machine, gun still in his hand, trained right on her.

He fired again, and it only clicked, out of bullets. He swore and was moving towards her before she could react, still frozen in fear and grief and terror. And then an unseen blade was slicing through her throat, pain tearing through her.

The machine fired up then with a flash of light, and then everything went black.

**One.**

Clarke woke up in a panic. There was something blocking her throat, and something in her arms that was making it hard to move them. Loud, mechanical noises were screeching around her, and she couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move and—

“Holy shit.”

She locked onto the voice, trying to find some way to communicate to whoever was there that she needed help. All she could see was a white ceiling and a blinding light.

And then a face bathed in shadows appeared above her, smiling down at her.

“Hi,” she said. “I need you to stop panicking, okay? I’m gonna take the tube out of your throat, but you need do be still for me to do that, okay?”

Clarke has no idea why there would be a tube down her throat, but she nodded as much as she could and tried to lay still.

The tube was pulled out, and she broke into a coughing fit. Someone brought a cup of water to her lips, and she drank it without even thinking to ask if they’d properly decontaminated it. As she downed the water, she glanced around the room, taking it in. It was very white and very clean. More people came in the room, looking at machines she was attached to and whispering to each other.

“Where am I?” she asked as soon as she was able to, her voice raspy.

The woman who’d first been there smiled at her. “You’re in the hospital,” she said, and Clarke vaguely remembered that that was a place where people used to go when they were sick or hurt.

Why was she in a hospital? _How_ was she in a hospital?

“What happened?” she asked. There were so many people in this room. Why weren’t any of them telling her anything.

A woman stepped closer to her bed. “I’m Dr. Tsing,” she said. “You came in with life threatening injuries on the morning of New Year’s Day, and you’ve been in a coma since.” She pulled out a light. “Follow this with your eyes.”

Clarke complied, letting the doctor blind her for a few moments. None of this was making any sense. Life threatening injuries? New Year’s Day? Coma? What was going on?

“I don’t understand,” she said after Dr. Tsing had finished shining her light in her eyes.

The doctor sighed, tucking the light into her pocket. “On January 1st, you were found in the street, bleeding out,” she said, and Clarke blinked at her, shocked. “You were brought here. A team of doctors operated on you, and somehow, miraculously, you survived what should have been a death sentence.” She shifted, writing something down on the clipboard she was carrying. “This is the first time you’ve woken up.”

That didn’t answer any of Clarke’s questions, but there was something nagging at the back of her mind that prompted her to ask, “What year is it?”

That got the first smile out of Dr. Tsing. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s still 1995. You’ve been out since January. It’s November 8th today.”

“Nineteen ninety five,” Clarke repeated dully. That couldn’t be right. It was 2020. She was in 2020.

“Can I ask you some questions?” Dr. Tsing asked, and Clarke nodded, distracted. “Good. Can you tell me your name?”

Clarke stared at her for a second. “My name?” she repeated. Shouldn’t they already know her name? Wasn’t that a thing in hospitals, that they knew peoples’ names?

“Your name,” Dr. Tsing confirmed. “You didn’t have any ID on you when you were brought in, and no one has come to find you. Do you remember your name?”

“Oh,” Clarke said, then nodded. “Yeah. I’m Clarke Griffin.”

“Clarke Griffin,” Dr. Tsing repeated, writing it down on her clipboard. “Good. When is your birthday, Clarke?”

“March 3rd,” she said, and then paused. She’d been about to say her real birth year, but if Dr. Tsing seemed to think it was 1995, then it would cause problems if she told them she was born in 1996, wouldn’t it? She did quick mental math. She was twenty four, but if she’d been in a coma for almost a year, that would make her twenty five now. Nineteen ninety five minus twenty five years would put her at being born in… “March 3rd, 1970.”

“Good.” The doctor kept scribbling on her clipboard. “Do you remember what happened before you were brought in?”

“No.” She couldn’t remember, couldn’t think, couldn’t figure out how she was in 1995. “What happened to me?”

“We’re not sure,” Dr. Tsing hedged. “We don’t have much information. We think you were attacked by someone.” She paused, her eyes dropping from Clarke’s face. “I can show you your injuries, if you think you’re ready.”

Clarke nodded. She needed to see what had happened to her, had to understand what was going on.

Dr. Tsing turned to one of the other people in the room, saying something quietly, and then there was some shuffling and moving until Clarke was handed a mirror.

“Don’t be shocked by your appearance,” the doctor said. “You’ve been asleep for a long time. I’m sure you don’t look quite how you remember.”

Clarke wasn’t really listening, just lifted the mirror instead.

Her face was kind of hollow and pale, but nothing different from living inside a lab on rations her entire life. Her hair might’ve been longer, but she couldn’t really tell.

All breath left her body, though, when her eyes fell on the bright red scar cutting through her neck. Her hand that wasn’t holding the mirror went up to it, trembling fingers brushing across the raised scar tissue.

It all came crashing back into her.

The time machine. Her mother. The attack. The gunshots. The man. The pain.

“Clarke. Clarke, what’s wrong?” She could hear Dr. Tsing dully through the fog of panic and grief that had taken over her entire body. “Clarke, I need you to breathe.”

The panic eventually died down, and she brushed at the tears on her face with one hand, the other still rubbing at the scar on her neck.

“He killed my mom,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “He killed my mom, and he tried to kill me.”

Clarke was in the hospital for a week, despite insisting she was okay. Police were called in, and she gave a description of the man who’d attacked her, despite there being no way of them actually finding him. He was a baby right now, or maybe a toddler, if he’d even been born yet. But apparently telling doctors that your mom had been killed meant having to talk to police in 1995, so Clarke complied.

Apparently her recovery was miraculous. She should have been dead before she reached the hospital. She shouldn’t have recovered from her slit throat. She shouldn’t be this active and alert and generally functional this soon after waking up from a ten month coma. They wanted to run tests on her, but Clarke only agreed to the ones they said were necessary.

Her clothes she’d come through the time machine in had been too soaked in blood to be saved, but they did have one thing for her.

“So they had to cut the chain off your neck,” Maya, her nurse, said, playing with something in her hands. “I tied them on this ribbon, though, and I’ve kept them in my jewellery box so they didn’t get lost.”

And then she was tucking her bundle into Clarke’s hand, and Clarke was staring down at three rings hanging on a long strand of ribbon.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and pulled the ribbon over her head. “Thanks, Maya.”

Maya also taught her how to use a phonebook, and she used it to find her mom, which was still the top priority. She was in the same city they were in now, which was good because Clarke didn’t know how travelling worked.

When she was finally released, that was where she was headed. She sat on a bench outside ARK Labs where her mom worked, and where Clarke had spent most of her life.

The building looked different now. Cleaner. Newer. There were gardens and benches and lights on the street.

It was weird.

Eventually, her mom emerged from the building, and Clarke made her way over.

Abby was about Clarke’s age, which was weird in itself. She was also visibly pregnant with Clarke, which was also weird.

“Abby Griffin?” she asked as she approached her, like she didn’t already know who she was talking to.

Her mom smiled at her, and there was a part of Clarke that wanted to break down crying for the mom she’d lost. But now wasn’t the time for that.

“Can I help you?” Abby asked, and reached for her neck, pulling the ribbon up over her head.

“Yeah,” Clarke said, holding it out. “I think you’ll recognize these.”

Abby took the ribbon and the rings on it, staring at it for a moment before her gaze flew to her left hand, as if to make sure that her rings were still there.

“Where did you get these?” she asked. “What is this?”

Clarke took a deep breath. “You and your husband have been studying time travel, haven’t you?” she asked, and Abby’s eyes snapped up to her face.

“How do you know that?” she asked. “No one knows that.”

“I know that,” Clarke said, “because you succeed in the future.” She swallowed. “I have those rings because you gave them to me to prove to you that I’m from the future.”

Abby closed her fist over the rings, staring at Clarke. “It worked,” she whispered, then shook her head. “Who are you? Why did I send you here?”

“I’m your daughter,” Clarke said, nodding at Abby’s belly. “Clarke Josephine Griffin.”

Abby nodded slowly, her hand that wasn’t holding the rings moving to her belly. “Why did I send you here?” she asked again.

“The world ends on New Year’s Eve in 1999,” Clarke said, watching her mother’s mouth drop open. “You sent me here to stop that from happening.”

The rings were enough proof, as her mother had predicted, and Abby invited Clarke to get in her car with her to head home for dinner to talk.

Her father was just as easy to convince when they got there, and Clarke scarfed down her food as her parents watched.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, placing her fork down when she noticed she was the only one actually eating. “Rations weren’t much where I’m from, and I’ve been in a coma for most of the year, and I’m just really hungry all the time.”

“No, it’s fine,” Jake said, still staring at her. “Eat. We can talk after.”

She finished her plate, and then told them what she knew of the future.

It went like this:

On New Year’s Eve in 1999, as the clocks struck midnight ringing in the new millennium, the world ended. Nuclear bombs were set off, killing a huge amount of the world’s population. No one really knew what the exact damage was, because anything technological was shut down at the same time. By the time people were able to get any kind of tech up and running again, it had been ten years. Any information that had been stored digitally was never recovered.

Clarke spent her life within ARK with her parents, as they tried to uncover what had happened to end the world. That was a fruitless task, and they threw themselves into their backup plan instead.

The time machine.

Over the twenty years following the apocalypse, the world itself deteriorated until it was uninhabitable for human life. Those rich enough, those who had the bunkers and the safe zones and the means to make it happen, started evacuating to space stations. Those who weren’t lucky enough to have grown up in a safe zone or a lab were left behind to die once the world breathed its last breath.

Jake was killed in an attack on ARK by outsiders when Clarke was fourteen, when they’d had technology back and had started on their time machine for real.

They’d finally gotten it functional a few days before Clarke and Abby planned to head back, in 2020 when there were only a few months of life left on Earth. They’d been planning to head back in time together, but then the outsiders had attacked again and killed Abby.

So Clarke had come back alone.

They didn’t ask her about the scar on her neck or how she’d casually mentioned being in a coma.

Abby and Jake just stared at her over their still full plates of dinner as she gave her summary, and then Jake asked if she wanted seconds. After being told what seconds were, she went back to the kitchen to get them, leaving her parents at the table.

When she returned with her plate piled high with her seconds, she sat back down in her seat.

“So,” she said, cutting into the meat. “Where should we start?”

Their first step was working to figure out who had codes to nukes and to narrow down the list of people they theoretically had to convince not to fire them.

Saving the world was a lot less exciting than Clarke had anticipated.

Most of her life was spent learning how to function in a functioning world.

She went to her first baby shower three weeks after first moving in with Abby and Jake. She was going as Jake’s cousin Josephine Lightbourne, which was their cover for why she was now living with them. Jake didn’t have any family nearby, so no one would be able to call the bluff.

The baby shower itself was fun. They played baby themed games and gave Abby presents for the baby. Unlike the name implied, there were no babies nor showers, but she still enjoyed herself.

She spent most of her time with Jake and Abby’s coworker Raven, who was apparently a genius and had been brought in on the whole end of the world, time machine, Clarke’s from the future thing.

“What’s this for?” Clarke asked as she was heading back to the snack table for more food. Her favourite thing about 1995 was definitely the food.

Raven followed her gaze to a large calendar. “Oh,” she said. “It’s a baby guessing thing. You guess the gender and the birthday and the weight and if you get closest on all three, you win a prize.”

“Oh,” Clarke said, and handed her the plate she was holding, moving over to add her guess to the calendar. _DUE DATE_ was written in big pink letters on February 27th, and Clarke bypassed it to write her guess on her birthday. 

“I’m pretty sure being the baby is considered cheating,” Raven pointed out and Clarke shrugged.

“It might change,” she pointed out, grabbing her snacks back. “Maybe trying to stop the world will make her go into labour a couple days early. I could be wrong.”

“Sure,” Raven agreed. “That seems completely plausible.”

Raven wasn’t the only person they brought in. There was also Jackson, who worked with Abby and Jake. Raven’s friend Monty was an expert hacker, and was considered an asset. With Monty came his best friend Jasper, who’s only real contributions were suggesting blowing things up and bringing snacks. Needless to say, Clarke liked Jasper.

The only one of these people who Clarke knew from the future was Jackson. She didn’t know what happened to the rest. They only asked once.

She celebrated Christmas for the first time she could remember with her parents. She bought them presents, and they bought things for her. 

It wasn’t particularly fair that she was just living with them and not contributing to anything, but all Clarke knew was wastelands and the inside of labs. She’d never had a formal education, so she didn’t have the qualifications to get a job doing anything she knew how to do. They were working on that—Monty was working on building a fake past for Josephine Clarke Lightbourne, so that she’d eventually be able to do things for herself—but she hadn’t been around them for more than a month and a half. It took time.

It happened two days after Christmas.

She was out walking in town, on her way to lunch with Raven. Someone passed by her and grabbed her purse, trying to tug it away.

“Let go,” she told him, tugging it back.

“Give me your fucking purse,” he growled, yanking harder.

And maybe Clarke should have been scared. But she’d grown up with outsiders making attacks. She knew how to handle herself, and this one man on the street wasn’t anywhere near as terrifying as the outsiders were.

So all Clarke really was was mad. Mad that the world was going to end in a little over four years. Mad that her mom had been murdered in front of her and she hadn’t been able to stop it. Mad that it had been the better part of two months and they’d made no progress on anything yet.

She was mad.

So she yanked back on her purse and growled, “Let it fucking go.”

And she burst into flames.

It was only for a second, long enough to scare the guy off but not long enough to burn her clothes off completely. She almost wouldn’t have believed it had happened if her hair hadn’t dropped out of the bun it’d been in, the hair tie burnt away, or her sweater hadn’t been smouldering.

She speed walked the rest of her way to the café.

“We’re not eating here,” she told Raven, and then left before she could protest.

They were back at Abby and Jake’s before she decided to answer any of Raven’s questions with one of her own.

“Do they own anything fireproof?”

Raven blinked at her. “What?”

Clarke shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, and then went into the backyard.

Abby and Jake had a pool, which was really cool. Clarke hadn’t gone swimming since before the end, and definitely had no idea how swimming was supposed to work, but in theory she was excited about the pool.

Currently, though, the pool was empty because it was the middle of winter and it was Canada. Or, at least, that was Jake’s reasoning. The climate as a whole wasn’t really the same in the future, so Clarke wasn’t sure what most of that had to do with the pool being empty.

But anyway. There was an empty pool, and that’s where she led Raven. The air was frosty and they were supposed to get their first snow, which Clarke was really excited about, but she made Raven help her roll back the pool’s cover and help her climb down into it.

“What are you doing, Clarke?” Raven asked, hugging her arms across her chest. “Why are your clothes burnt? Why did we skip lunch? Why are you in the middle of Abby and Jake’s empty pool in the middle of winter? And why are you _stripping?”_

“Something happened,” Clarke said, pulling her shirt off over her head and then starting on her pants. “I want to make it happen again, but I don’t want to burn anything.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Raven asked. Clarke didn’t answer, just pulled off her bra and then her underwear. Raven sighed and sat down at the edge of the pool. “Is this some weird future ritual?”

“No.” Clarke threw her clothes up and Raven caught them piling them beside her. “This guy tried to take my purse—”

“ _What?_ When? Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”

“—and then I, like, lit myself on fire?” Clarke’s brows scrunched together, shaking her head. “I don’t know what happened, but I need to make it happen again.”

“Wait.” Raven stared down at her. “Wait. Back up a minute, Clarke. You lit yourself on _fire_? How? Why?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Clarke repeated, throwing her arms out. “I don’t know how it happened. It just did.”

Raven was still staring at her. “So you just, like, spontaneously combusted on the sidewalk?”

“Yeah,” Clarke said, nodding. “Exactly. Is that, like, normal here?”

“Is it normal for people in the twentieth century to spontaneously combust?” Raven asked, and Clarke nodded. “No. It definitely is not normal.”

That decided, Clarke tried to light herself on fire again. She was cold, and fire was warm, so it’d probably warm her up, if her other reasons weren’t enough motivation.

But the issue was that she didn’t know how she’d done it in the first place, and had no idea how she was supposed to go about doing it again.

Raven left at some point to head inside and get herself some hot chocolate and a snack. She tossed some food down to Clarke, who scowled at her but scarfed it down.

As time wore on and Clarke got colder and colder, she got more and more frustrated. None of Raven’s half-hearted suggestions were working, and she couldn’t figure out what she was doing wrong. She’d wonder if she’d imagined it the first time if not for the scorch marks on her clothes.

“Abby and Jake are gonna be home soon,” Raven said. Clarke had no idea how long they’d been out there, but she could barely feel her extremities. “Maybe we should go inside and warm up and try again another day.

“No,” Clarke said, shaking her head. “No, I know I can do it.”

Raven sighed. “Clarke—”

“No!” she yelled, and then it happened.

She could feel it a split second before it happened, her body warming up all over before the flames burst out. Last time, she’d been shocked and stopped it quickly, but this time she tried to hold it, and it worked.

She was inside a flame, but she couldn’t feel it burning her. She just felt warm and cozy and nice. Her hair fluttered around her, somehow both still her hair but also the flame itself.

She let it go after a few minutes, and was suddenly freezing cold.

“Holy fucking shit,” Raven said from the edge of the pool. “Holy. Fucking. Shit.”

Clarke looked down at herself, and she was completely unharmed. No burns. Not even a slight scorch. The same couldn’t be said for the pool, the surface of which was charred black.

“I need my clothes,” she said, walking towards the ladder and hoisting herself up. “Fuck, I’m freezing.”

“So we’re not even going to acknowledge the fact that you just lit yourself on fire?” Raven asked, helping her out and handing her her clothes. “We’re just bypassing that?”

Clarke laughed, her teeth chattering. “We can discuss it once I’m not freezing anymore.”

That time came after Clarke spent a while soaking herself in a hot shower. She was half tempted to try to bring the flames back to warm herself up quicker, but she didn’t want to risk accidentally burning down Abby and Jake’s house.

By the time she rejoined them downstairs, Abby and Jake had gotten back from work and the others had also joined them for dinner.

“I almost thought you were dead,” Jasper told her as she joined them at the table. “That’s the only reason I could think of for you missing out on food.”

Clarke laughed and dug into her heaped plate. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and she really was hungry.

“Seriously?” Clarke looked across the Raven, who was staring at her. “Wow. Okay. I’ll share, then. Clarke spontaneously combusted today. Twice.”

Clarke swallowed her mouthful. “The second time was less spontaneous,” she pointed out. “We were trying to make it happen that time.”

She demonstrated it again in the pool after dinner to everyone except her parents—that would be weird for all of them—and it didn’t take as long this time. She and Raven had hypothesized that her combustion was triggered by anger or frustration, so they took a short cut in getting the guys to throw things at her until she snapped.

And it worked.

Something about being completely engulfed in flames and not having to worry about burning was surprisingly peaceful.

Clarke still had coffee occasionally with Maya, the nurse from the hospital, so she set her up with Jasper. It took a few weeks, but Jasper was able to get a copy of the records of the tests they’d performed on her while she was in her coma and after she woke up.

Abby and Raven performed more on her at ARK, running blood samples and tissue samples and putting her in different machines she couldn’t name.

It was mid-February by the time they decided on a reason behind Clarke’s combustion.

Something in the time travel or the future or both had caused a higher level of radiation in Clarke’s system. There was no way to really prove that that was the reason behind the whole fire thing, but there was no reason to believe it wasn’t.

Time travel had made her able to light herself on fire.

When she accidentally cut her hand open while chopping vegetables, they learned that it had also made her heal quicker. It also explained her miraculous recovery from her throat being slit open.

On March 3rd, 1996, right on schedule, Clarke Josephine Griffin was born. Josephine Lightbourne won a fuzzy blanket and a scented candle for being spot on with the birthdate and the gender. The weight was off, but with two out of three, she was still the winner.

Meeting herself was weird. She held baby-her in her arms and stared down at her, wondering how she could have ever been that small.

Jasper came in later freaking out about paradoxes or something, but apparently that wasn’t applicable in real life.

It was decided that they’d call her Josephine around baby Clarke. Less confusion, and it would prevent any mishaps in the future if baby Clarke started talking about her parents’ friend, also named Clarke, when said person didn’t technically exist.

Clarke nicknamed her C in her head.

Something Clarke didn’t remember about the world before the end was superheroes, but there apparently was one.

His name was Super Soaker, and Jasper and Monty were obsessed with him. He’d shown up earlier last year, and no one could really get clear photo or video of him. He did little things, mostly, like saving cats from trees and stopping muggings using his water powers.

Monty was convinced it was all faked and was trying to prove it. Jasper was convinced that Super Soaker was completely legit, and liked to use Clarke as proof.

“If Clarke can light herself on fire, then Super Soaker can make water fly,” he argued during a strategizing session one night. “It’s, like, so much easier.”

“But Clarke only has powers because she time travelled,” was Monty’s counter argument. “There’s no way Super Soaker also just happened to time travel here. That would be crazy.”

Clarke didn’t really have the energy to put into taking a side in the argument, or into putting much thought at all into Super Soaker in general. His name did seem to register in some corner of her mind every time she heard it on the news or read it in the papers.

The four years after waking up from her coma passed quickly.

C grew up into a toddler. Clarke really hadn’t spent much time around kids at all, and wasn’t sure if C was normal in her annoying to cuteness ratio.

Jasper and Maya got married. It was the first wedding Clarke had ever been to.

Raven kept trying to set Clarke up on dates, which she didn’t have time for. Not when none of the dates ever turned into a second. Apparently, “in a bunker” wasn’t the correct answer to “where did you grow up?” and telling them the truth about where the scar on her neck came from wasn’t appropriate first date conversation. Clarke preferred the anonymous hookups she found for herself in bars, anyway. No having to field a fake past. No getting attached. No time wasted. 

Clarke also got better at controlling her powers. It took years, but she was eventually able to control where and when the fire came, and how much fire she produced. It was honestly really cool. Raven created a flame proof material and had some clothes made from it. It was great for when she lost control and didn’t want to end up naked.

She also learned how to swim, and figured out why the pool wasn’t filled with water in the winter.

She spent months detailing the designs and the plans of the time machine to her parents, trying to get them closer to creating their own, just in case.

As their deadline kept closer and closer, and conspiracy theories about the world ending got more and more prominent, Clarke was getting more and more stressed out.

While she was getting better at controlling her fire and at being around people in a non-post-apocalyptic civilization, things weren’t going anywhere near as well on the stop the world from ending front.

They’d figured out some names, possible stopped a few bombs, but that was it.

There just wasn’t enough time to start with nothing and try to infiltrate multiple governments and corporations and trying to stop an entire apocalypse.

Maybe if Clarke had come to the past with more information. Maybe if she hadn’t spent most of 1995 in a coma. Maybe, maybe, maybe. So many maybes.

Maybe if things had been different, they might have actually been able to do this.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, and Clarke was alone.

Abby and Jake wanted to spend their last night with their daughter, and Clarke didn’t blame them. She’d lied about having plans so they wouldn’t invite her to stay out of pity. They were her parents, but she wasn’t their daughter. They had C, and Clarke was C, but she also wasn’t.

And she was okay with that.

The only problem was that everyone else had plans that didn’t include her. Jasper and Monty had flown home to spend the night with their families. Jackson had a boyfriend, and was staying in with him. She wasn’t entirely sure what Raven was doing, but she hadn’t seen her since Christmas and she wasn’t answering the phone, so Clarke figured she wasn’t an option to spend tonight with, either.

She didn’t have anywhere else to go to ring in the end, so she went to a bar. Maybe she’d find someone to hook up with and at least be doing something fun when the world ended.

It was getting close to midnight, and everything inside her was freaking out. Everyone around her was so happy, so drunk, so oblivious. She just wanted to scream at them to run, to find somewhere to hide before it was too late.

She could feel a warmth building up inside her, the telltale warning sign of being about to lose control of her powers, and headed for the door, slipping outside into the cold.

A man joined her a few minutes later, nodding at her and then leaning back against the wall.

“Waiting for a cab?” he asked, and she shook her head.

“Just getting some air.”

She watched him nod from the corner of her vision. “It’s a lot,” he said, and she hummed in agreement. “It’s hard watching them, knowing what’s to come.”

Clarke turned towards him slowly. “What’s to come?” she asked, and he turned her way.

There was something about him that was familiar, something about him that seemed completely seared into her brain from some long ago time, and his eyes scanned her face like he was thinking the same thing.

And then his eyes dipped lower. Clarke thought he might just be looking at her cleavage, which looked absolutely killer in this dress, but the shock that spread across his face when he looked back up at hers was not one that usually accompanied people looking at her boobs.

“It’s you,” he whispered, stepping closer, his hand raising to brush along her scar. “You’re alive.”

And then it hit her, slamming into her like a nuke on doomsday, stealing her breath.

This man was familiar because he was from her time. This man was familiar because he was the last thing she’d seen before the time machine had activated.

She could never forget his face, and felt like a fool for taking so long to connect it to its origin.

Who could forget the face of the man who’d murdered her mother and slit her throat open?

“You,” she growled, grabbing his wrist in her hand and turning up the heat. He yelped, trying to pull away, and she just held him tighter, upped the temperature until flames were dancing on her fingers. “You killed my mom.”

She could feel his skin bubbling under hers, could hear the pleas he was crying for her to let go.

And then her hand was doused in water, her flames spluttering as she released his arm in shock.

“What the fuck,” she growled, and then threw caution to the wind and lit herself on fire. Her underwear and bra were fireproof, not that she really cared about being naked right now.

“Holy shit,” he said, staring at her.

And then the snow that was melting around her retracted, moving towards him and floating up around him.

All the control of her fire that she’d managed to build disappeared in that moment, her rage at this man for forcing her to come here on her own, for killing her mother, for putting her in a coma for a year, it consumed her entirely.

It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair. The world was still ending, and it wasn’t fair.

So she threw her frustration at him, burning through his water and striking him with her flames. He hit her back, the snow around them his perfect ammunition to let him get close enough to really fight her.

It went on and on, no clear winner. People who came into the street scream and ran.

And then the sky lit up, and they both froze, staring up at the nuke streaking through the sky, coming closer and closer and getting bigger and bigger, as the bar behind them counted down the last seconds to midnight.

The last seconds to impact.

As Clarke stood in her underwear in the street, the man who’d killed her mother was who she found herself reaching out to as the bomb came closer and closer. He grabbed her hand and held it just as tightly as she held his, and they watched their death come.

_“Three! Two! One! Happy New—”_

**Two.**

Clarke woke in a panic. Something was down her throat and something else was in her arms and something was beeping around her.

“Hi,” Maya said, coming into her field of vision and blocking the worst of the bright light, smiling down at her. “I need you to stop panicking, okay? I’m gonna take the tube out of your throat, but you need to be still for me to do that, okay?”

She reined in her panic enough for Maya to pull the tube from her throat, trying to figure out what the hell had happened.

How had she gotten into a hospital? How were the lights working? How was she still alive?

Her throat was too dry to speak, so she gulped down the offered water as Dr. Tsing came in.

“Where am I?” she asked, as soon as she could. “What happened? How am I here?

“Calm down,” Dr. Tsing said slowly. “You’re in the hospital. I’ll answer all your questions. Let me shine this in your eyes first.”

“No!” Clarke batted the light away, scanning the room. “What am I doing here? What happened?”

Dr. Tsing sighed, but seemed to realize she wasn’t getting anywhere with her stupid light until she answered Clarke’s questions. “On January 1st, you were found in the street, bleeding out,” she said, and the words pinged a distant memory. “You were brought here. A team of doctors operated on you, and somehow, miraculously, you survived what should have been a death sentence. This is the first time you’ve woken up.”

None of that made any sense. The world ended. The bombs came, and Clarke wasn’t able to stop them. She shouldn’t have been found bleeding out in the street. She should have been dead.

“What day is it?” she asked, trying to work the rest out in her head.

“November 12th,” Dr. Tsing said. “You’ve slept through most of 95.”

Clarke’s panic disappeared for a second, replaced with complete and utter confusion.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “It’s not 95. It’s 2000.”

Dr. Tsing frowned at her and scribbled something on her clipboard. “Why would you think it’s 2000?”

“Because it is!” Clarke insisted, throwing her arms up. “It was New Year’s Eve, and I didn’t stop it and the nukes were coming and—”

“I think you’re mistaken,” Dr. Tsing interrupted. “You’ve been asleep for a while. It must have been a realistic dream.”

“No!” Clarke yelled, shaking her head. “It’s not! It happened!”

Dr. Tsing turned to one of the other people in the room, quietly asking them to page security and psych.

“I don’t need psych!” Clarke insisted, reaching to pull the IVs from her arms. “I don’t need any of this! I’m fine!”

“You’re not fine,” Dr. Tsing said, too calm, too level. “You’ve been in a coma for most of the year. You can’t just get up and walk.”

“Yes, I can!” Clarke snapped, pushing out of the bed. “I’m leaving! I need to figure out what the fuck is going on!”

Everything happened in slow motion.

Security rushed in and Dr. Tsing directed them to Clarke. They grabbed her arms and tried to push her back to the bed.

All of the sound disappeared as Clarke’s confusion and panic grew, a ringing in her ears the only thing she could hear.

And then she lost control, erupting into flames.

There was screaming, dim, far away screaming, somewhere beyond the ringing, but Clarke was panicking too much to pay attention to it. The security officers had dropped her arms, and she was heading for the door.

Then the first explosion came, as the fire in the room hit the first oxygen tank.

Clarke was blown backwards out of the room, but other than crashing into a wall she was fine.

Sounds came crashing back in, and she ran.

She made four stops after leaving the hospital.

The first was to break into a nearby store and steal some clothes. The hospital gown she’d been in had burnt away, and running around in the street was kind of conspicuous. Even with her brain barely functioning, some subconscious part of her mind thought to wrap a stolen scarf around her neck to hide her obvious scare.

The second was a newspaper stand, where she confirmed it was, in face, November 12th, 1995.

A little over four years earlier than it should have been.

The third stop was Maya’s 1995 apartment. She’d been here enough times to know where Maya kept her jewellery box, so it was a simple job to break in and steal her rings, already thread onto the ribbon.

Her fourth stop was ARK, where she sat on the same bench she had five years earlier to wait for one of her parents to come out.

She could, theoretically, just go to their house to begin with. She knew where it was and where they hid their spare key.

But she was pretty sure they would freak out more and not listen to her if she broke into their house, so she waited outside their work.

It was her dad who came out first today.

“Jake Griffin?” she asked, walking up to him. Before he could even greet her back, she thrust out the rings. “I’m your daughter. Abby and I finished your time machine, and I came back from 2020 so we could stop the end of the world.”

Jake was just as quick to accept her story and invite her into his car.

When they got home, Abby was already there, and Clarke insisted they call Raven and Jackson over, and to get Raven to bring Monty and Jasper.

If they were going to figure out how or why she was somehow back in 1995, they were going to need all hands on deck.

They were waiting for them to arrive, Clarke scarfing down some food her parents offered her, as starving as she’d been the last time she’d woken from her coma, and Abby turned the news on.

_“—Hospital. The fire is believed to have been started by an unknown woman who had recently awoken from a coma. Jane Doe fled the scene after an explosion. Six people have been confirmed dead, including neurologist Dr. Lorelai Tsing and nurse Maya Vie, who were in the room when the explosion happened. The other victims have not yet been identified. Firefighters are still working to put out the fire. If you have any information on the whereabouts of Jane Doe, please call…”_

Clarke didn’t hear much after the announcer said Maya’s name.

She’d killed her. She’d killed Maya.

“Oh no,” she whispered, clutching her chest. It was too hot in here. It was too hot. She ripped off her scarf, throwing it across the room, and tried to make herself breathe.

“Clarke,” Jake said and she turned to look at him, still panting. He was looking between the picture on the TV, one they must have taken of her while she was in her coma, her eyes closed and skin deathly pale, large bandages wrapped around her neck. “Clarke, was that you?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, voice breaking, suddenly back to being four and dropping a week’s worth of rations into the dirt. “I didn’t mean to. I panicked. It was an accident.”

The others arrived then, and Jake left to get the door, leaving Clarke and Abby staring at each other.

“I didn’t mean to do it, Mom,” she pleaded.

It was harder this time, but it was also easier.

It took them all a bit longer to warm up to her. The whole _stop the end of the world_ thing everyone was on board with right away. Clarke herself was what was different. Last time, she hadn’t burnt down half a hospital. Last time, she hadn’t killed eight people and badly injured many others.

None of them turned her in, though. Jake and Abby kept her hidden in their house, and, when she did go out, she wore scarves around her neck. Eventually, her friends were her friends again, but it took a while.

Gathering information was what was easier. If she’d known she’d get a second chance, she would have put more effort into memorizing the information she’d gathered, but they were still starting with more than last time.

She spent the week after waking up from her coma bent over pieces of paper, scribbling down every little detail she could think of and handing it off to Jasper and Monty to organize.

Things were different after C was born, too. Last time around, Clarke had been allowed to babysit and spend time alone with her younger self. This time, the hospital incident was still too fresh, and people hovered around her when she was near the baby.

She told them to call her Josie this time around C. Josephine had been too big for her to pronounce, and she’d ended up Auntie Josie last time anyway.

The first time she heard about Super Soaker, she spent hours pouring over every video and picture she could find until there was no doubt about it.

Super Soaker was the man who’d killed her mother.

The revelation that Super Soaker was also from the future cleared up Jasper and Monty’s argument, but it mostly just led to no one talking about him. She overheard Raven and Jackson talking about it one day, though, wondering how they’d ended up trying to save the world with the help of the villain instead of the hero.

Over the next four years, they made more progress on stopping the end. They stopped a few more bombs, found a few more names, heard whispers of an AI that might be going rogue.

It was more than last time, but it still wasn’t enough.

As the end of the millennium approached, it wasn’t enough.

Clarke spent the weeks leading up to the dawn of 2000 memorizing everything she could about what they found. They weren’t going to be able to save the world this time, but if the loop reset again, and they had no reason to believe it wouldn’t, having this information at the beginning might help them save it next time.

She was alone again on New Year’s Eve. Even with four years of living together, she was alone this time. She couldn’t call any of them her friends, just her colleagues. They tolerated her so they could try to save the world. If she hadn’t gotten them to believe that, they would have turned her in.

If she hadn’t had the world to save, she would have turned herself in.

She wasn’t feeling like a party, so she wandered the beach, pulling her coat tightly around her to ward off the chill. She’d have heated herself up with her fire if she could have, had it simmering under her skin, but she hadn’t felt comfortable enough to ask Raven to invent her fireproof material this time around, and she used her fire so little that she wasn’t confident enough that she wouldn’t just burn her clothes away.

She saw the waves before she saw him, crashing up and around him on the beach, bigger and tamer than ones that could have come from the otherwise calm sea itself.

It wasn’t until she was closer, when he’d turned the waves into shapes, animals made of water dancing through the air, that she realized who this was, what it meant.

“Super Soaker,” she said softly, and the water crashed to the sand as his head snapped up, his gaze finding hers in the dark.

“Jane Doe,” he greeted, scrambling to his feet.

And then they were fighting.

She had nothing new against him this time. She’d really only even seen his super name once.

But she’d spent more than four years fighting towards the same fruitless goal, more than four years being judged for an accident—a deadly accident, yes, but an accident all the same.

She’d spent more than four years essentially alone, so much pent up rage at the world for ending, at her mom for leaving her alone, at the machine for making her live through all this again, at _him_ for killing her mom and making her waste almost a year in a coma.

She had so much rage that she threw it all towards him, towards their fight.

She had no idea if anyone could see them, could see the flames dancing and the waves crashing on the beach.

She had no idea if anyone watched her flames hit him, send him falling to the ground, making him lose control of the ocean for just long enough for her to get inside striking range.

She had no idea if anyone watched her snap his neck.

Her rage went out with his life, and she pulled her flames back inside her, pushed them down as she mentally added him to her kill count.

Nine in this life plus a few dozen outsiders back in her time.

She sunk down in the wet sand and dug her fingers into it, staring at his lifeless face.

She’d killed him, the man who killed her mom. He was dead, but she didn’t feel any better.

She sat next to his body as she watched the bombs fall again.

**Three.**

Clarke woke up, panicking. There was a tube down her throat and needles in her arms, machines beeping around her.

“Hi,” Maya said, smiling down at her. “I need you to stop panicking, okay? I’m gonna take the tube out of your throat, but you need to be still for me to do that, okay?”

**Five.**

The walls of Jake and Abby’s home were decorated with information. They had twenty years worth of information. They had names and dates and places. They had people working dozens of different ends, trying to fix it, trying to save the world.

The bombs still fell.

**Fifteen.**

Raven infiltrated City of Light Co., the manufactures behind ALIE. They found out that their hunch was right, that the creators were quickly losing control of the AI, and that it was likely they would by the end of the millennium.

The world still ended.

**Thirty seven.**

She ran into him again on New Year’s Eve. She usually ran into him on New Year’s Eve, just before the end. She still didn’t have another name for him aside from Super Soaker, nor he for her besides Jane Doe.

He killed her this time.

The cycle still reset.

**Seventy two.**

Clarke was done with his shit.

Super Soaker was so active this cycle that she couldn’t ignore him no matter how hard she tried. It was _Super Soaker saved my grandma. Super Soaker rescued my cat. Super Soaker brought my entire town clean drinking water. Super Soaker’s a hero. Everyone loves Super Soaker._

Not everyone loved Super Soaker, in fact. Clarke was sick and tired of hearing his name everywhere. She was sick and tired of hearing people sing his praises, when the only reason she was still stuck in this loop was because he’d come through the machine with her instead of her mom.

He killed her mom, but everyone still worshipped the ground he walked on.

So on August 18th, 1997, Clarke hunted him down.

And she killed him.

It was big and bright and fiery and dramatic, but that was his fault. He’d fought her, so she’d had to fight him back. It was public and a spectacle, and she killed him.

No one got a good look at her, before she lit herself on fire. They knew she was blonde and they knew she was a woman. That was about it, which meant they couldn’t find her.

She made sure there were no casualties aside from him.

But she was still labeled as a Supervillain.

It was far from the first time she’d killed him, but it was the first time she’d been considered a supervillain. Aside from the second cycle, when Raven had whispered it to Jackson when they hadn’t thought Clarke could hear.

The people called her Wanheda, bringer of death, after a movie character. With her fire, they claimed she’d come straight from hell. People spent years mourning Super Soaker’s death and wondering when and where Wanheda would strike next.

She killed him, but, like all the times she’d killed him before, it didn’t make her feel any better.

**One hundred eleven.**

On March 4th, 1999, a man dropped into a seat next to Clarke at a bar, his hands raised and his face open.

“If I buy you a drink, can we not fight this year?”

Clarke considered it. She was exhausted. She’d just had her 579th birthday yesterday, while C had her 3rd. She’d been doing this for so long that she could barely remember what her mother looked like back in her own time, could barely remember the apocalypse she’d been fighting so long to prevent. And, in less than a year, she was going to have to start over again because they weren’t close enough yet to stop it from happening.

She was tired and she was already a few drinks in and she just really didn’t feel like fighting.

“Okay,” she said, and he offered her a tired smile.

She found them a booth while he got their drinks, and then he slid into the seat across the table from her.

“John Murphy,” he said, sliding her drink towards her. “We’ve already known each other half a millennium. Figured I should finally introduce myself.”

Clarke smiled back despite herself. “Clarke Griffin,” she said, then shrugged. “Though, I go more by Josie Lightbourne these days. Harder for people to confuse me with the three year old Clarke Griffin I live with that way.”

John looked like he wanted to question her on that, but shook his head instead, leaning forward.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, looking sincere. “I really am. I’ve been trying to tell you that for centuries. I’m really sorry for shooting your mom, and for your throat.”

She nodded slowly, unsure what to do with that information. She’d spent so long hating him for it that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do if she forgave him.

But it had been so long, and he was the only person going through this with her, that maybe it was time.

“I forgive you,” she said, realizing as she spoke the words that she meant them. His face lit up, and Clarke wasn’t sure how that made her feel. “You can help save her.”

They ended up heading back to his apartment, stopping at a liquor store on their way.

They got drunk, and they told each other everything.

She told him to call her Clarke when he tried to call her Josie. Most people called her Josie now, yeah, but it seemed wrong for him to call her by her middle name. He was from her time, so he should call her her name from her time.

He told her he went by Murphy. He’d gone by Murphy for as long as he could remember, far back into their own time. He couldn’t remember when he’d made the switch or why, but no one called him John.

Clarke told him about the time machine, how her mom’s plan had been for the two of them to come back and change everything, how she didn’t know why it gave them their powers, how she didn’t know why they were stuck in this endless loop.

She told him about her parents in this time, about their team and the information they’d been gathering, the things they were trying, how every time they thought they might have fixed something, something else popped up.

She told him about how weird it had been the first few cycles to be around her parents when they were her own age, to be around herself as a baby and a toddler. She told him that it had stopped seeming weird at some point, but she couldn’t figure out when.

She told him about the coma, how it varied in how long it was before she woke up. The first time was in early November of 95, and got later and later every time. Sometimes by days, sometimes by weeks, sometimes it even went back a few days to lull her into a false sense of security.

This cycle, she’d woken up on August 5th, 1996.

She’d missed out on the better part of two years that she could have been working towards stopping the end.

She told him how she didn’t know what it meant, that the coma kept getting longer.

She didn’t tell him how it was one of the few things that still scared her.

Murphy told her about his time before. They’d heard about the space stations and the evacuations, and they were mad that they were being left to die. He couldn’t remember what their ultimate goal was in attacking ARK, but most of his people had been killed before he’d reached the room with the time machine.

He told her how the first cycle, he’d been so confused about where they were and what had happened. He’d thought she was dead, so he’d just left her there and run, trying to find answers. He’d met a man who was nice enough to take him in, who, for some reason, believed him when he said he was from the future and that the world was going to end. He’d been working on less information, less steady connections, but he’d been working towards saving it, too.

He told her how, after that first time, after he knew she was alive, he stayed with her body, putting pressure on her wound and staying with her until help came.

He told her how he discovered his powers by accident, how he saved a kid from drowning a week or so later. The kid and his parents had called him a superhero in the papers, even though he’d run off afterwards. He’d gotten into some trouble in that first cycle before he figured out what was happening and found Bellamy, and there were people looking for him. The kid called him Super Soaker, and the name had stuck. He’d saved that kid every cycle since, had announced it as his name when he’d saved people earlier in each cycle.

By the end of the night, both of them were beyond drunk, but they decided to call it a truce. They’d spent centuries fighting and killing each other. It was time to put this behind them.

The next day, Murphy invited his crew over to the Griffins’, and they told them about their truce and pooled their resources. 

Murphy’s crew consisted of Bellamy Blake, the man who’d taken him in in the first cycle, Bellamy’s sister Octavia, Nathan Miller, Harper McIntyre, and Zoey Monroe this cycle. There were a few others who came and went from his crew depending on the cycle and the year, but this was who he had right now.

There were a few snide comments about why it took so long for them to do this, but Clarke ignored them for the most part.

They didn’t have time this cycle to fix everything. They didn’t have time this cycle to save the world.

But maybe next time, with both of them working together, maybe they’d finally do it.

The next few months were spent with both Clarke and Murphy pouring over their information, putting everything they could to memory. They made plans for the next cycle, for how Murphy should get in contact with Jake and Abby, how to best convince them he was telling the truth.

She also learned that, when she wasn’t actively hating and trying to kill him, she actually kind of liked Murphy. He had this dry sense of humour that was so similar to her own. He was kind of an asshole, but in the same way that she was kind of an asshole, in the same way that anyone who’d lived the same five years a hundred and eleven times would be an asshole.

As much as she tried to fight it at first, by the time the cycle started drawing to a close, Clarke and Murphy were actually friends.

And for the first time, Clarke approached New Year’s Eve with something close to hope.

She went to a New Year’s party with Murphy. She’d spent so many New Year’s Eves with Murphy, but this would be their first peaceful one.

He’d been to this party before, apparently, and it was also apparently a good one.

He was right. There were people in sparkling clothes, glittering in the light. There was champagne and finger foods, dancing and excitement.

December 31st, 1999, was the day that Clarke hated the most.

But she hated this one a little less with Murphy by her side.

She was in her own sparkly dress, ready to ring in a new cycle, and she let Murphy spin her around on the dance floor.

Neither of them were particularly good dancers. There wasn’t much pre-apocalypse dancing during the apocalypse, and neither of them put that much effort into learning how to dance in the cycles before.

But Clarke let Murphy spin her around, and she pretended that they were here for real, that they were just patrons at this New Year’s party who were supposed to be here.

_“Sixty! Fifty nine! Fifty Eight! Fifty seven!”_

The music stopped and people started counting down the last minute of the year, but Clarke and Murphy kept dancing.

_“Twenty four! Twenty three! Twenty two!”_

Murphy’s foot slipped and he went tumbling down, pulling Clarke with him. She landed on top of him, and pushed up with her hands on his chest.

_“Fifteen! Fourteen! Thirteen!”_

“Oops,” Murphy whispered, and the way he was watching her did something to Clarke’s insides.

_“Twelve! Eleven! Ten! Nine!”_

“Watch what you’re doing,” she whispered back, teasing, not sure why she wasn’t moving, not sure why they were whispering.

_“Eight! Seven! Six! Five!”_

Murphy’s hands came up, one moving to the small of her back and the other to brush back the hair that had fallen in her face.

_“Four!”_

She ran her hands up his chest.

_“Three!”_

His eyes dipped down to her lips, his tongue coming out to brush along his own.

_“Two”_

She leaned in, their noses brushing, and second guessed herself for a second.

_“One!”_

No. Kissing as the new year came in was supposed to bring luck. They could use all the luck they could get for the start of their next cycle.

_“Happy New—"_

She closed the distance between them, their lips pressing together softly, briefly, and then—

**One hundred twelve.**

Clarke woke up, panicking. There was a tube down her throat and needles in her arms, machines beeping around her.

But it wasn’t Maya’s face that blocked the blinding light this time, but Murphy’s, eyes wide and frantic.

“She’s awake!” he yelled, and then put his attention back on her. He smiled softly, brushed his hand over her cheek. “You’re okay, Clarke,” he whispered, his thumb brushing over her cheek. “You’re okay. Just breathe. They’ll get it out in a second.”

After the tube was out, she studied Murphy as she drank her water. He looked less panicked then before, but still didn’t look that great. His hair was a mess, his clothes were wrinkled, it looked like he hadn’t slept or shaved in weeks.

“You’re lucky to have this one,” Maya told her, nodding towards Murphy. “Your husband has hardly left your side since he brought you in.”

Many things jumped out at her from Maya’s word, but _husband_ was the one that jumped the highest.

She still hadn’t drunk enough water to be able to speak, so she turned to look at him. He shook his head slightly and shrugged, and Clarke was aware enough to know that this wasn’t the time to discuss that yet.

Dr. Tsing came in as she was finishing her water. Apparently today, whatever it was, was a busier day for her than normal.

Clarke let Dr. Tsing shine her light in her eyes, and answered her questions.

She stumbled over her name, though. She’d told Murphy her alias, but that was back in the last cycle, back before he’d apparently made the decision that they were married now.

“Josephine,” she said, and then paused. “Murphy?”

Dr. Tsing nodded, and Murphy squeezed her hand.

She got through the rest of the questions easily, and then it was time for her own.

“What day is it?” she asked, glancing between the people in the room.

“You’ve been asleep for a long time, Josie,” Dr. Tsing said, frowning in what Clarke had long since determined was a mostly false concern. “It’s October 5th, 1996.”

Clarke stared at her, feeling a little like her throat was closing up again.

October 5th.

Two whole months later than she woke up last time.

That was the larges time difference yet.

Clarke didn’t have to put much thought into the routine. They ran tests. They told her how well her recovery had gone, how miraculous it was that her muscles hadn’t atrophied.

She’d gone through this so many times that her answers and her movements had become habitual.

Which meant she could focus all her energy into the feeling of Murphy’s hand wrapped around her own.

It was probably for their married cover, whatever the reason that that had become their cover, but mere minutes ago for Clarke she’d been kissing him. She still wasn’t sure what that had been about, why she’d thought it would be a good idea, but it was still fresh in her mind.

And now he was here with her, holding her hand and saying he was her husband.

It was a little confusing.

Eventually, the doctors and nurses left them alone, and Clarke turned to Murphy.

“So,” she said, her voice still raspy from the months of disuse and the breathing tube. “My husband, huh?”

Murphy blushed, which was hilarious in and of itself. Clarke had ben semi-friends with him for most of a year last cycle, and she couldn’t remember ever seeing him blush.

“Yeah,” he said. “They have rules in hospitals, apparently, about who’s allowed to visit people and get information and updates. Maya asked if I was your husband when she was getting your information, and I went with it.” He squeezed her hand, leaning closer to the bed. “Fuck, Clarke. I’ve been freaking out for two fucking months that you wouldn’t wake up this time.”

“I woke up,” she told him, squeezing his hand back. “I always wake up.”

Neither of them mentioned the possibility that one day she wouldn’t, but Clarke could tell that they were both thinking it.

She prompted Murphy into telling her what he’d been doing while she was in her coma, then.

He was wearing her dad’s ring, and had her mom’s rings on Maya’s ribbon around his neck. It helped sell the whole married story, and she pulled on her mom’s rings when he offered them to her. She could pretend to be married to Murphy until she got out of the hospital. He’d laid the groundwork, so it wouldn’t be that hard to sell.

He’d found her parents, used the rings as proof. Monty had already gotten them their fake identification, which Murphy had claimed was stolen when they were attacked.

He’d also gotten in contact with his usual crew, and they were collaborating with Clarke’s crew. He’d told them everything he’d memorized, and they were already working away at the connections they had to make and the people they had to befriend.

If they hadn’t called a truce, Clarke would be starting at the beginning now, with only three years and three months left until their deadline.

Murphy was still active as Super Soaker. It had become such an ingrained part of him now that he couldn’t just not be the hero. He’d gotten Raven started on creating her fireproof clothing for Clarke, too.

He looked exhausted, and Clarke felt bad for him. She told him to go home and sleep, but he shook his head. It wouldn’t look good for their cover if he went home the second she woke up, apparently.

She didn’t mention how he hadn’t let go of her hand since she’d woken up, because if she mentioned that, she’d have to mention how he keeps playing with it, even when the nurses or doctors weren’t in the room, and, if she mentioned that, he’d probably stop. She didn’t mention it because she didn’t want him to stop, and didn’t want to have to confront what that might mean.

Murphy had a house, Clarke discovered when she was released from the hospital. It was in a central location for everyone in their team, and a basement that had become ground zero for their information. The walls were plastered with papers, words and articles and pictures, folders and empty food wrappers littering the tables.

“How can you afford a house?” she asked as he crouched in front of the fireplace in the living room. She’d never had the time to get a job, never even learned how you went around getting one. Jake and Abby had always let her live with them, even when the world branded her as a supervillain or a murderer, but apparently Murphy had the means to buy his own house.

Murphy laughed, shaking his head. “Have you heard of the lottery yet?” he asked her, and she shrugged. She’d heard the word, but wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. “You pick numbers, and then if the people running it pick your numbers as the winner, you win, like, a lot of money.” He shrugged. “Memorized a few sets of winning numbers in the first few cycles and use them when I need them.”

“Huh,” Clarke said, nodding as she watched him struggle to light the fire. She flicked her wrist, igniting his logs and sticks into a bright flame. “That’s actually really smart.”

He had a room set up for her, too, told her it was finally time for her to move out of her parents’ house. It was pretty plain, but there were clothes in the drawers and a bed, and Clarke had never really needed much more.

Murphy had his superheroing on the side, and tried to bring her into that.

There wasn’t much her fire could do to save people. Besides focusing on the bigger picture, that was one of the reasons she hadn’t tried this whole being a hero thing before. Fire burned, fire hurt. It didn’t help save people.

Until they were out driving and came on a building on fire.

She ran inside, trying to find people as Murphy blasted it with water from the outside.

The flames were overtaking the building, surrounding her, and Clarke tried something she hadn’t thought to try in all her centuries of life.

She tried to pull fire into her that she hadn’t created.

And it worked.

In mere minutes, she’d taken all the fire from the building into herself. She could feel it bubbling under her skin, could feel herself burning up, feverish, but it had worked.

Most of her clothes were made from Raven’s fireproof material this cycle. Bellamy could sew, so he’d managed to create more sophisticated designs than the basic, shapeless things she’d been working with in the past.

When she came out of the building, Murphy waved her over to where she was talking to reporters. He grabbed her arm gently, and then let go, hissing as his palm was burnt on her skin.

Murphy used a nearby payphone as she tried to think cooling thoughts, to put the fire nicely away in wherever her own fire was stored. Miller showed up with his truck after a bit, and they traded vehicles.

She lay in the back of the truck as Murphy drove, trying to keep the fire from bursting back out of her.

They were in the mountains when they stopped, the cool air already having done a bit to take the edge of the fire boiling inside her. When Murphy pulled to a stop, they were parked on the side of the road, surrounded by snow.

She’d figured out what the plan was by now, and hopped out, the snow sizzling and steaming under her feet. She waded through the snow drift as it melted around her, and then flopped down in the snow.

By the time she was just lying in soggy grass, a Clarke shaped hole melted into the snow, she was feeling better. Still a little warm, but nothing bad. She was more in control, could push the rest of the warmth, the rest of the fire, deeper inside her.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying there. Murphy was sitting inside the truck, watching her, when she stood up, and he climbed out as she walked over.

“Better?” he asked, and she nodded. He sighed, and then grinned at her. “That was amazing, Clarke.”

She blinked at him. “What was amazing?” she asked. “Melting the snow?”

“No.” He shook his head, still grinning at her. “What you did with the fire. You absorbed all of it. I’ve been listening to the news. They say you saved so many lives.”

Clarke shook her head, swallowing heavily. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “If I hadn’t been there, you would’ve still put it out.”

“Not as fast, and I wouldn’t have saved everyone.” Murphy moved towards her, grabbing her hands. “Clarke, I didn’t know you could do that.”

She shook her head again. “I didn’t either,” she said. “I just couldn’t not do anything. But I’m not a hero.”

Murphy grinned wider and squeezed her hands. “It takes a few dozen cycles to get used to it,” he told her, and then dropped her hands, nodding at the truck. “Can we discuss it on the way home, though? You might still have a fever, but I’m freezing my balls off out here.”

Clarke spent most of the drive back down the mountain silent, staring out the window. Murphy had the news station still turned on, and she listened as the anchors speculated on who the woman with Super Soaker had been.

_“Whoever she was, she saved lives today. She’s a hero.”_

She didn’t feel like a hero. She just felt wet and tired.

By the time they made it home, they were calling her the Flame Eater, and Murphy was chuckling about it next to her as she drifted in and out of sleep.

She’d lost all her energy, her legs turning to jelly beneath her as she tried to stand, and Murphy had to carry her to her room. He helped her change into dry clothes and tucked her into her bed, and Clarke fell a little bit in love with him.

They got further together. They made more connections, placed more names to faces to bombs. Raven worked her way further up the ranks at City of Light Co., got closer to the AI than she’d gotten before.

Clarke spent more time with Murphy than she spent with anyone else this cycle. Her parents had their jobs, and their friends had their own jobs, their own tasks to get them closer to saving the world.

Clarke had her own tasks, but they were more sporadic. Go to this party and schmooze up to these people to get this information. Fly to this place to meet with this person and convince them to let Monty into this classified area.

Murphy’s tasks were about on par with hers, though his also included funding their crusade with his seemingly endless supply of winning lottery numbers.

And they worked on her powers. She practiced absorbing fire she hadn’t created herself, building up the amount she could safely absorb. She helped Miller sometimes on his fire crew, absorbing bits and pieces of fire to make it safer for the firefighters to get in and out. She only pushed her limits when she had to, when someone’s life was depending on it, but she was getting better and better.

The media still called her the Flame Eater. Murphy thought it was hilarious, but Clarke didn’t mind it. It was a million times better than Wanheda.

As they worked to save the world, Clarke’s heart was working towards something else, something impossible, something she couldn’t have.

Every day, she fell a little bit more in love with Murphy.

She fell in love with how impatient he was in traffic, how he yelled and gestured whenever something wasn’t going his way.

She fell in love with how he was the only person she knew who ate as much as she did. Even after spending centuries in a civilized time period where there was more than enough to eat, it was nice to see that she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t get over the years of starving.

She fell in love with the way he looked in the morning, with his hair wild and his eyes squinty.

She fell in love with every little bit of him.

She loved him, more than she’d loved anyone else before.

But she didn’t have time to be in love. She didn’t have time for him to distract her from their goal.

No matter how much she loved him, no matter how much she thought he might love her back, they didn’t have the time, not when they had a world to save.

The world still ended at midnight.

**One hundred seventy nine.**

Over the years, Clarke had seen Murphy use his powers for a lot of things. Saving people, for one, but also under other, less extreme circumstances.

Washing the dishes was a big one. He’d squirt the soap into the sink, and then just absentmindedly whirlpool the water in the sink while he did other things for a few hours, and, when he finally remembered what he was doing, they’d be clean.

He also had very few actual showers. Like with the dishes, he’d squirt some soap on his body and then go stand in the backyard with a bucket and more or less bombard himself with waves until he was clean. Clarke wasn’t sure if it was a particularly efficient system, but she’d yet to take him up on his offer to give her a Super Soaker Shower, as he’d dubbed it.

Not that Clarke was saying she didn’t use her own powers for mundane things. They heated their house almost exclusively by the fireplace, where they threw in random pieces of wood and she’d light it with a flick of her wrist. She’s also gotten really good at toasting bread between her hands, and at making trick birthday candles. And neither she nor Murphy ever had to wait for their hair to dry—he absorbed the water left on his while she simply made hers evaporate.

Even with all of that, she still didn’t really know the extent of his powers.

“Fuck,” she said, holding her hand out from under the eave of the restaurant, feeling the fat drops of rain hit her skin. “Why didn’t we wear coats? Or bring an umbrella?”

They were heading to Monty and Harper’s wedding. Not the first time they’d hit it off and gotten married, but the first time they’d picked this specific day and had it rain.

And, of course, she hadn’t worn a fireproof dress, so she was looking at being soaked for the wedding.

“The weather said it was supposed to be nice,” Murphy reminded her, following her outside.

They were parked a ways away from the restaurant they’d stopped at for lunch—weddings were long and both of them were perpetually hungry, so they opted to eat first before having to wait for the reception, and apparently they’d picked a restaurant on a busy road—and it didn’t look like the storm was going to let up anytime soon.

“This is going to be the worst,” Clarke grumbled, and then stepped out into the rain.

She’d almost made it to the edge of the street when she realized something was wrong, off.

She wasn’t getting wet.

She held up her arm and watched the rain slide around it, as if it was hitting an invisible barrier, and then turned back to stare at Murphy, her eyes wide.

“I didn’t know your powers worked on the rain.”

He grinned at her, shaking his head. “I can’t, like, make it stop raining or anything,” he said. “But, yeah. Have you ever seen me get soaked in the rain?”

Now that she was thinking about it, she hadn’t. It was really something though, standing in the middle of a storm, hearing the rain pound the ground around her, but staying completely dry.

And then something else hit her.

“You’ve let me get wet in the rain before,” she told Murphy, crossing her arms over her chest, and he laughed.

“Yeah, but you’re so cute when you look like a drowned rat,” he said, and then wrapped his arm around her shoulders, tugging her forwards towards the car before she could protest or be too offended. “Come on. We’ve got a wedding to catch.”

**Two hundred twenty four.**

Clarke had hooked up with people before. One night stands where neither of them expected anything more, and where, half the time, they didn’t even bother to learn each other’s names. Maybe it was a little weird that she’d been alive for so long and never actually been in a relationship, but she liked it that way. If she didn’t get attached, if she didn’t let someone else get attached, no one would be hurt when the loop reset and she started a new cycle where they had no idea who she was.

And it had worked. For 223 cycles, her _only hook up with random people and only do it once_ strategy had worked.

Until she and Bellamy were in London to meet with a man about a bomb.

They’d taken this trip dozens of times before. Clarke and Murphy would have been the obvious choices for an across-seas trip, seeing as neither of them had jobs, but Murphy was shit at negotiating. He was, to put it mildly, generally an asshole, and, while Clarke loved that part of him, people they were supposed to be schmoozing up to didn’t. The few times she’d brought Murphy to London to meet with the Wallaces, it hadn’t gone well.

So she brought Bellamy, who was great at getting people to like him when he wanted to, and usually got them some free stuff out of this trip, along with convincing the British Prime Minister to not launch his nukes.

She’d done something differently this time, because she had to be the one doing something different for him to act so different, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

Whatever she’d done, though, had led to him kissing her.

And so she’d kissed him back, and now she was waking up next to him, naked as the day she was born.

This wasn’t how she did things. She didn’t sleep with people she had to interact with. That complicated things. If someone had feelings for her but never acted on those feelings, that was one thing. She could pretend she didn’t notice, and things would stay unrequited, and no one would get hurt when the loop reset.

But this was complicated.

Bellamy clearly liked her enough to kiss her, enough to sleep with her. If he wanted anything more than that one night, she’d have to say no, have to stop this from becoming more than it already was, to save them both from getting hurt.

Loving Murphy, even though she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—act on it, it was easier. She never had to look at Murphy and watch him not recognize her. Murphy never forgot her, and she never forgot him.

If things progressed with Bellamy, if she fell in love with him, that would be bad.

She’d move on to the next loop, and this Bellamy would stay here. She’d see him again next time and have no idea that they’d slept together, that they’d been anything more than a couple of people working together to stop the apocalypse.

So that was why she was already dressed when he woke up, and why she told him it couldn’t happen again. She couldn’t look at him as she did it, didn’t want to know how heartbroken he might be.

She told Murphy when they got back, because it felt wrong not to. He told her he’d hooked up with Bellamy a few times, back in the early cycles, and welcomed her to the club.

**Two hundred eighty eight.**

“It took me decades to find this place,” Murphy said as they walked into the courtyard. The sign on top of the gate welcomed them to Polis Home for Boys. “After the end, there was a big group of us that survived. The older ones called it the Dead Zone, and I forgot it had any other name.”

They walked through the yard, watching the boys run around and play.

“How old are you right now?” Clarke asked, quietly. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing you said out loud.

“It’s 98, so I’m about three and a half,” he said, then nodded over at a group of boys. “See that kid eating sand with the shovel? That’s me.”

Murphy, the younger Murphy, the Murphy that actually belonged in this time period, was sitting in a sandbox. His hair was shaggy, and he was dressed in the same plain clothes as the other boys. He was laughing as he shovelled sand into his mouth, chatting on about something she couldn’t hear with the other boys gathered with him.

“My dad died before I was born,” Murphy, her Murphy, continued, and Clarke reached out to grab his hand. “And then my mom died giving birth to me. I didn’t even remember that, until I found this place. I knew they were dead, but I didn’t know how. This was the only place I ever lived before the end.”

“Murphy,” Clarke sighed, not knowing what else to say.

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” he said, and then started walking them back out the gate. “I don’t remember them, and I don’t remember this place.”

They walked down the street a bit, then sat on a bench. Murphy said it was because they’d be questioned if they spent too much time in the yard of the orphanage, but Clarke figured that even if he didn’t remember that place, it must still be weird being back.

“I adopted him once,” Murphy said quietly, staring down at their joined hands in his lap. “He was five and the world was close to ending, so I adopted him. We spent a week or so driving down the coast and stopping at whatever attraction one of us wanted to see. And then we spent days in Disneyland, riding every ride a hundred times. I bought him all the food he wanted and whatever overpriced toys or clothes. And we stayed there until the cycle ended, and he was so happy, Clarke. I don’t know if I was ever that happy when I was his age, even before the end.”

“That sounds really nice,” Clarke whispered, squeezing his hand. “I’m sure he really liked that.”

Murphy nodded and sighed. “I’ve talked to Harper about it before,” he said, shifting the topic. “You know her and Monty can’t have kids. When we think its gonna work, they’re gonna adopt him, give him a real home and a real life.”

“That’s great, Murphy.” Clarke leaned her head on his shoulder, and he sighed, nodded, and asked where she wanted to go for lunch.

When they realized in 99 that this wasn’t going to be the cycle it worked, they memorized what they needed to early on, and then Murphy cashed in on a few more winning tickets. They bought a couple of big buses, and then adopted enough kids to fill those, from both Polis Home for Boys and their sister home for girls.

They spent the last months of the cycle driving around and bringing joy to the kids, following their every whim. Clarke rode her first rollercoaster, and wondered why it had taken her so long to feel like she was flying.

**Three hundred seven.**

“Can you do this later?” Murphy snapped, digging a hand into his hair. He was squeezing her own hand with his other so tightly she wondered if it might break. “Can you just give us a minute first? _Please_?”

Clarke watched the nurses and doctors leave the room, wondering what had happened in the time she’d been in her coma to get Murphy so worked up.

“How long was I out this time?” she asked, turning to look at him, to take him in. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair a mess, his face unshaven, and he just stared at her. She swallowed down the panic that was rising inside her. “Murphy, what day is it?”

He stared at her a minute longer before whispering, “January 1st, 1997.”

Two years.

She’d been in a coma for two years. She’d left Murphy to do this alone for two years.

She’d slept through forty percent of their timeline.

“Oh,” she breathed, sinking back into her pillows.

“Clarke,” Murphy said, and she turned to look at him. There was a glint in his eye, something she recognized without really recognizing what it was. “Clarke, I can’t keep doing this.”

She wanted to ask him what he meant, if he meant waiting for her to wake up, if he meant the whole time loop thing in general, if he meant something else.

She wanted to ask, but she didn’t have time.

Because, as soon as the words had registered, he was standing up, reaching across her to cup her cheek, his other hand still tightly clenching hers.

And then he was kissing her.

And Clarke had spent years wanting to kiss him, too, so she couldn’t stop herself from reaching up and grabbing his shirt, tugging him down closer.

“I love you, Clarke,” he whispered against her lips, kissing her again. “I’ve been in love with you for almost a millennium, Clarke, and every five years, you’re bleeding out in my arms again. Every five years, I have to watch them take you into surgery and not know if this is gonna be the time it doesn’t work. Every five years, I have to wait longer and longer for you to wake up, and every time I have to wonder if this is it, if this is the time you don’t wake up, if this is the time I really killed you.” He sighed heavily, pressing their foreheads together. “Clarke, I love you, and I need you to know that. I can’t keep pretending I don’t.”

There was a brief moment that Clarke considered whether this would be too much of a distraction, but she quickly pushed it aside.

She’d loved him for just as long as he’d loved her, and pretending she didn’t hadn’t stopped the world from ending yet.

So she pressed forward, kissing him again, pulling him closer.

“I love you, too,” she whispered, like it was a secret, like she didn’t want to scream it out to the world.

She wanted to tell him more, how much he meant to her, how long she’d wanted to tell him, but he was kissing her again.

But that was okay. They had time, all the time in the world, endless time and cycles.

They had time.

So she just kissed him.

They got married, a few months later, turned their centuries old lie into a reality. It was a small wedding, their only guests their crew this cycle. Her dad walked her down the aisle, and C, a little over a year old, toddled down the aisle throwing flower petals. Their marriage certificate said John and Josephine, but they called each other Murphy and Clarke in their vows.

The world still ended.

**Four hundred sixty five.**

Clarke woke up from her coma on November 9th, 1995.

Other than the first time, this was the earliest date she’d ever woken up.

And, for the first time since they’d called their truce, Murphy wasn’t there when she woke.

Maya assured her he was on his way, but Clarke wasn’t really listening to her.

She was exhausted. She’d just woken up after sleeping for almost a year, but she was absolutely exhausted.

They’d been doing this for over two thousand years, and it didn’t seem like they were getting any closer to actually saving the world.

She was done.

Murphy came crashing through the door after a few minutes, the buttons of his shirt done up wrong and mismatched shoes on his feet.

He sat on her bed and cupped her cheek, and Clarke let him kiss her for a moment.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she whispered afterwards, their foreheads pressed together. “I can’t keep trying to stop the apocalypse when we keep failing. I can’t do it.”

He shook his head. “We can do it,” he assured her. “We’ll get it. You’re awake earlier this time. Maybe that’s all we need. Raven thinks she’s found something new, and Bellamy met someone who can—”

“No.” Clarke pulled away, searching his eyes. “No. I can’t do it this time, Murphy. We’ve been doing the same things over and over for thousands of years. I can’t keep doing this. I need a break. I need to just live for a bit.”

So they took a break.

Everyone they usually knew and worked with were beyond mad when they told them, so they didn’t see them much.

Murphy cashed in on another winning lottery ticket, and they took off.

Clarke had really only travelled when it was necessary for saving the world, had never really travelled for fun or taken in the sights.

So they went everywhere. They travelled the world, buying souvenirs that would disappear at the end of the cycle, giving money to people who needed it. The world would still end, but if they could make this cycle better for some people, why shouldn’t they?

They made their way through Europe and Asia, making note of where they needed to come back to again. There was no rush, but they wanted to be everywhere, to see everything.

They were in Australia when Clarke got sick. It wasn’t that bad, really, just a bit of soreness and puking in the mornings. It wasn’t that bad, except that they didn’t get sick. Whatever was in the time machine that gave them their powers, that made them heal faster, it kept them healthy.

But she was sick.

It went on for days, so Murphy made her go to the hospital. She didn’t like hospitals, only spent time in them when she was in her coma.

She explained her symptoms to the ER doctor, who nodded.

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

Was there? They used protection. There hadn’t been even a pregnancy scare yet. Was it even possible?

The doctors ran a blood test and, not long after, they had the results.

She was pregnant.

They were mostly quiet on the drive back to their hotel, taking it in. It took 465 cycles, but she’d gotten pregnant.

“What do you want to do?” Murphy asked as they sat in their parked car outside the building.

As much as she wanted to have to think about it, there wasn’t anything to think about it.

“I want it,” she told Murphy, turning to smile at him. “I want to have a baby.”

He grinned back and then reached across the console to kiss her.

They cut their travelling short to head back home. Lincoln, someone who was sometimes in their crew, was a gynecologist, and, even though she hadn’t met him in this cycle yet, there wasn’t anyone else she’d trust with her and her baby.

They bought a house in the woods, away from the city because, even after so many years, having so many people around freaked them out. They decorated it with their things from around the world, and they painted a bedroom for their baby.

As many houses as they’d had in the past, this was the first one that really felt like a home.

Clarke went into labour on December 21st, 1996, and their beautiful baby girl was born early on the 22nd.

“Hi, Stella,” she whispered to the screaming bundle in her arms. “I’m your mommy.”

The bliss of having their baby lasted less than two weeks, before they sat in their living room, watching the New Year’s countdown on TV.

“We’re going to lose her,” Murphy whispered, holding their sleeping baby to his chest. “Clarke, we’re gonna lose her in three years.”

Clarke shook her head, her hand pressed to her mouth as she tried not to cry. “What did we do?” she asked, turning to stare at her husband. “What did we do, Murphy?”

Abby was the one to open the door when they finally crawled back there a couple weeks later, tails between their legs.

“We’re here to help, Mom,” Clarke whispered, shifting her hold on her daughter. “I’m sorry we left.”

The only person who seemed happy to see them was C, who was a little under a year old, and even C seemed more enthralled with Stella than with either Clarke or Murphy.

Everyone else only seemed to let them come around to help save the world, and it reminded Clarke of a long ago cycle where they thought she was a terrible person but kept her around anyway.

The others had made progress, but Clarke and Murphy had millennia of memorized information, and they pushed the mission even further.

It wasn’t enough.

Everyone knew it, and this time it was Clarke and Murphy who took the longest to agree that it was hopeless. They hadn’t accomplished much more that was new this time around, so there wasn’t much to memorize before they disappeared again.

They got three years with Stella. Three wonderful, perfect years with their wonderful, perfect daughter.

She had Clarke’s hair and Murphy’s grin, a wild personality that got her into trouble. When she was mad, sparks flew from her fingers, and her bathwater always ended up all over the bathroom. Clarke was just thankful she hadn’t seemed to have anything more dangerous or disruptive yet.

Stella was their whole world, so when the minutes left in this cycle grew slim, they built a fort out of blankets in their living room and hid inside. They made it a game, so she wouldn’t be scared, had snacks and stories and toys. When she fell asleep, they curled up around her and whispered how much they loved her.

And they lay there crying as the world ended around them.

**Four hundred sixty six.**

Clarke woke up, panicking. There was a tube down her throat and needles in her arms, machines beeping around her.

But none of that was why she was panicking.

She held Murphy’s gaze as Maya pulled the tube from her throat. He looked broken and exhausted, and she ignored the offered water and forced herself to speak.

“Stella?” 

It came out barely a whisper, barely audible, but he heard her, confirming her fears with a brief shake of his head.

She collapsed in a sob. He caught her, held her tight and cried with her, ignoring the doctors and nurses around them as they mourned their daughter.

Their daughter who never existed in this life.

They still celebrated her birthday with a cake and a day off from saving the world, holed up in their house instead.

They never had another kid. Not in this cycle, and not in any other. They couldn’t go through losing another child.

**Six thousand eight hundred thirty two.**

Actually saving the world happened almost by accident. Clarke still wasn’t completely sure how they did it, what tiny thing they did differently this time to make it work.

But here they were, December 31st, 1999, and Clarke was almost certain that this was the time it would happen.

Neither of them knew what would happen at midnight if it really did work, if they’d continue on into 2000 or still go back to 95 or maybe even go back to their own time, so they just didn’t discuss it.

None of them came out and said it, but they were all thinking it.

This could be it.

Harper and Monty had even adopted the younger Murphy, who currently went by Johnny, a few months earlier. They’d even sent Clarke and Murphy a Christmas card with him on it, beaming out from under a Santa hat and hugging their struggling dog around the neck.

They’d spent the last month memorizing, as they always did, because they didn’t want to jinx anything. They didn’t want to believe this was it, and then wake up back in 95 and have to start over again with nothing because they were too overzealous in their celebrating.

Clarke and Murphy went to a bar, though. It was the one where they met each other again in their first cycle, the one where they fought each other outside in the snow and then held hands as the bombs came down.

So much time had passed since then. So much had happened.

They weren’t drinking, because drinking before a reset made Murphy disoriented when they looped back to 95, and he didn’t like not having all his wits about him when he had to try to stop her bleeding.

They weren’t drinking, but they were dancing, letting themselves get swept up in the excitement and cheer around them. Clarke could feel tension rise inside her as they got closer and closer to midnight, and she danced more with Murphy, trying to ignore the tension.

They were in the middle of the dancefloor when the countdown started, and Clarke shifted in closer to Murphy, holding him tight.

Usually, they didn’t join in. It felt kind of morbid to count down to the end of the world.

But this year, she found herself counting along, her arms wrapped around Murphy’s neck and his around her waist.

“Five,” she whispered, her eyes not leaving his.

“Four,” he whispered back, tugging her closer.

“Three.” The crowd was really getting wild, vibrating with excitement.

“Two.” Clarke leaned in, her nose brushing against Murphy’s.

“One.” He closed the distance between their lips, and she kissed him back, neither of them daring to breathe.

_“Happy New Year!”_

For the first time after tens of thousands of years, they got to hear the cheers as the year 2000 rang in.

Clarke woke up, completely at peace. Nothing was down her throat and the only thing in her arms was Murphy, her head resting on his chest. The noise around her was the ringing of a phone and not the beeping of hospital monitors.

She lay there another minute before climbing out of bed to get the phone.

They hadn’t stayed at the bar much longer after midnight, rushing home to check the news, to confirm that they’d done it.

And they had. The world hadn’t ended, and they hadn’t been sent back in time.

It was Abby on the phone, who Clarke only habitually thought of as her mom at this point. She greeted her as she walked though the house, flicking her wrist to restart the fire in the fireplace as she passed.

_“I’ve been watching the news_ ,” Abby said. _“Everyone has been talking about how funny a hoax it was that the world would end at midnight. I think we did it.”_

Clarke smiled to herself as she walked back towards the bedroom. “I think we did it, too.”

_“But you’re still here,”_ Abby said. _“I invented a time machine once. I could do it again, send you and Murphy back. Do you want my to start working on it?”_

She leaned against the doorway, staring in at Murphy, still asleep, draped across their bed with his mouth hanging open as he snored, and she considered Abby’s offer.

Did she want to go back to the future? What would that even look like? Would they go back to the future they came from, or a new one where there hadn’t been an apocalypse?

Did she want to leave this?

She considered it as she watched Murphy sleep.

They’d finally saved the world, finally moved into the 21st century. They could do anything they wanted. They could travel. They could learn how to get jobs, figure out something they wanted to do. They could make new memories, learn new things and live through things where they didn’t already know the outcome.

And her hand drifted down to rest on her stomach, where there was a secret she’d been ignoring for weeks. She hadn’t brought it up to Murphy yet, because they’d have had to either end it when she told him, or let the end of the world end it. It didn’t happen that often. They were careful. They only slipped up every dozen cycles or so. This time, she’d discovered it close enough to the end that telling Murphy would only hurt him. If they were wrong about saving the world, then this would reset, too. No need for him to have to know about it only for it to be ripped away. She herself hadn’t even acknowledged the signs until now.

But the world hadn’t ended. Telling Murphy wouldn’t hurt either of them now. She could acknowledge it, and they could make a decision based on what they actually wanted this time, not on what would hurt them the least.

She had a life here. She had Murphy and the secret growing inside her. They had friends and people they loved.

Did they really want to leave all that behind?

“I think we’re good,” she told Abby. “For now, at least.”

_“Let me know if you change your mind,”_ Abby said before hanging up.

Clarke dropped the phone on the top of her dresser and climbed back into bed, curling up with Murphy, ready to sleep away thousands of years of stress.

As she drifted off again, she wondered if they ever would change their minds.

They had no idea what the future held without the apocalypse. They had no idea what they’d be going to in the future.

But here, they had whatever life they wanted to build, with nothing set in stone, no looming deadline.

They just had to live.

And, right now, curled up in bed with the man she loved, Clarke couldn’t think of anything better.

* * *

_Can you see the broken rays of light  
_ _Calling throughthe dead of night?_   
_And I know that I'll see you again_   
_Where the shadow ends_

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of really want to write a companion piece from Murphy's POV but I also am not going to promise anything because I always say that with Chopped fics and so far zero Chopped fics have had a sequel. So no promises, but it is something I'm considering and hopefully will get to at some point.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed!!!
> 
> Comments and Kudos give me life!
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr at Probably-Voldemort!
> 
> Hope everyone is staying safe and has been having a happy holiday!!


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